Peranakan, in Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia, a native-born person of mixed local and foreign ancestry. There are several kinds of Peranakans, namely Peranakan Chinese, Peranakan Arabs, Peranakan Dutch, and Peranakan Indians. The Peranakan Chinese, however, form the largest and the most important group, and for this reason many scholars use Peranakan to refer specifically to the Chinese group.
Until the end of the 19th century, the immigration of Chinese to the Indonesian archipelago was limited because of difficulties in transportation. Most of those who reached the island of Java were men, mainly from the southern provinces of China, who then married indigenous women, usually nominal Muslims or non-Muslims.
In time these immigrants, their local wives, and their descendants formed a stable Peranakan Chinese community. Peranakans partly adopted the indigenous way of life and generally spoke the local language rather than Chinese. Along the northern coast of Java, where the Chinese population of insular Southeast Asia was concentrated, a combination of Bazaar Malay and Hokkien dialect was used as a common language, and this language later became known as Bahasa Melayu Tionghoa (Chinese Malay). The Peranakan Chinese community was firmly established in the Indonesian archipelago by the mid-19th century and had become self-contained with a decline in intermarriage. New immigrants were rapidly assimilated into the Peranakan community because there was no mass immigration.
Several factors contributed to the shaping of a Totok (“full-blooded”) Indonesian Chinese community in the early 20th century. Most significant were the great increase in the number of Chinese immigrants (including women) to Java, the dynamics of Chinese nationalism, and the development of local Chinese-medium schools. Unlike the Peranakan Chinese, the Totok Chinese were born in China, still spoke Mandarin or another Chinese dialect, and were frequently strongly China-oriented.
Despite the rapid growth of their community in the Indonesian islands, the Totok were overwhelmingly outnumbered by the Peranakan Chinese. In 1930, for example, Indonesian-born Chinese constituted some four-fifths of all the Chinese in Java, and more than half of the total were at least third generation. But they were by no means a homogeneous political group. Before World War II there were three political streams in the Peranakan Chinese community—the Sin Po group, which was China-oriented; the Chung Hwa Hui, which was Dutch East Indies–oriented; and the Partai Tionghoa Indonesia, which was Indonesia-oriented. These three groups were dissolved during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia in 1942–45.
In Singapore and Malaysia the term Peranakan refers primarily to Straits-born Chinese—that is, to those born in the former Straits Settlements (specifically, Singapore, Penang, and Melaka) or in the former British Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia) and their descendants. Straits-born Chinese men are commonly called Baba, whereas the women are called Nyonya. The Hokkien-Malay creole characteristic of the Singaporean and Malaysian Peranakan population is known as Baba Malay; since the mid-20th century, however, the language has largely been replaced by local forms of English.